A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for OSNews entitled "Update on Red Hat's Limbo Progress." It was to be a short article on how much Red Hat's beta releases have impressed me - to share with everyone some of the changes a desktop user sees and maybe generate some additional interest in my choice, Linux. Little did I know, one of my comments nearly incited a riot- it would flood my Inbox, leave me feeling silly about something that I still think is true...it was just poorly stated.
So, let's try a little experiment.

The company plans to reset its tools to work with new products expected to ship in the coming months, including Windows.Net Server and an update to the SQL Server database. Stories at C|Net and eWeek.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1 beta1, the second development release of KDE 3.1, which follows 6 weeks after the release of KDE 3.1 alpha1, a significant feature upgrade for KDE 3. KDE 3.1, scheduled for final release in October 2002, will provide substantial improvements to the KDE desktop experience.

"Almost a year after it donated some $40 million worth of code and tools, IBM is on the warpath once again, drumming up support for the open-source Eclipse project. Eclipse may not be as well known as some other open-source projects, such as Linux, Mozilla, or Apache. It's certainly not as sexy. At its core, Eclipse provides a common platform, user interface, and plug-in framework for integrating development tools." Read the rest of the story at InternetWeek. We should add that if the Eclipse web site add some easy to find screenshots and become a bit more straightforward of what it is and what it does, instead of corporate blah-blah, surely more people would get interested in. Expect a review of the QNX version of Eclipse, dubbed 'Momentics', in the near future.

The GNOME Usability Project is proud to announce the release of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (v1.0), the product of usability engineers, designers, hackers, and Irish wine. The guidelines deliver both specific advice on making effective use of interface elements, as well as the philosophy and general principles behind the guidelines. Read the release announcement (including a plea for interface unity between free software projects), or jump straight to the meat.

VectorLinux, a lightweight distribution of GNU/Linux was just released. The new version is called SOHO 1.0, and while it is based on the previous version, VectorLinux v2.5, it still has many enhancements. Features the KDE 3.x desktop including Koffice and the KDE development suite. OpenOffice, AbiWord, the Gimp, Realplayer, Xmms, Mozilla-1.0, Opera 6.x, Cups printing system, scanner support, java runtime, kernel 2.4.18 and several entertaining games are all included. The founder, Robert Lange, is looking for more developers to join him, a new web master and people to try the free download of SOHO or to buy the CD in order to fund the project.